Lectures on Tap - "The Hallucination We Call Reality"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "The Hallucination We Call Reality"

🎤 Speaker: Professor Michael Cohen

Your brain lives in darkness, sealed inside your skull and cut off from the world. It never sees light or hears sounds directly; it only receives electrical signals from your senses. So how does it figure out what’s “out there”? By making educated guesses—constantly. Most of the time it’s accurate, but sometimes it can be spectacularly wrong.

In this mind-bending talk, Professor Michael Cohen will explore how your brain constructs reality rather than simply recording it. You’ll experience striking visual and auditory illusions, confront your own blind spots, and hear real cases where brain damage has altered people’s perceptions of colors, faces, and emotions. Along the way, you’ll discover why what feels like an objective, stable world is actually a fragile, ongoing hallucination your brain is generating on the fly.

Professor Cohen is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Amherst College and a research scientist at MIT, with a background in philosophy from Tufts and neuroscience from Harvard. His work focuses on how human consciousness arises from brain activity, especially in relation to perception and memory.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.